And see all those lovely fourteenth-century ceilings?

[sovay]

One week after launching, my Patreon has reached $200 a month. That means all backers get the collected e-book of reviews at the end of the year. People who know who you are, thank you so much. This is wonderful.

(I am now taking suggestions for a next milestone goal. More poetry? More reviews? I'm pretty sure I can't ask to do this full-time, but I would like to know what readers want. This remains an entirely new model of funding for me.)

The 76-minute original cut of Baby Face (1933) is amazing. I don't know if I'd even call it sordid—sexually outspoken, devastatingly cynical, with one of the most triumphantly bump-and-grindy musical leitmotivs I've heard in a long time. Every time Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers sleeps her way up another floor of the towering phallic skyscraper of the Gotham Bank, we get a bar of the brassy, strutting "St. Louis Blues," introduced earlier in the film by Theresa Harris' Chico. St. Louis woman with her diamond rings, oh, Lord, she leads that man of mine by her apron strings . . . For much of its runtime, the film clocks along like a comedy, inviting the audience to enjoy watching cool operator Lily game the patriarchy—for every new employee who thinks he's sneaking a perk on the side, there's another, poorer sap reeling in Lily's unrepentant wake, stone cold straight to the top. Her emotional damage is real, but so is the film's frank delight at seeing a once-victimized woman take the system that hurt her for everything she can get. I'm not surprised it couldn't pass the New York State Censorship Board. We're not meant to feel sorry for any of the men. It's unsentimental until the denouement and even then our heroine doesn't collapse into a heart of gold; nor is she punished, much as the censored version tried to give her an unhappy ending. I'm trying to think if this is the earliest film I've seen where a survivor of sexual abuse and a full-scale fallen woman gets a happy ending. The story also contains a black character who is not a stereotype and life advice from Nietzsche that actually works out. I'll try to write something more coherent tomorrow. Right now I'm just really impressed.

Comments

[sovay]

whichever actress it was who made the argument that once it became OK for filmmakers to put women back in the bedroom they stopped putting them anywhere else

Oh, crud, I've heard that and I can't remember; it's a valid point. Still, before the Code kicked in, women were doing all sorts of things onscreen. I would like to have seen the films that followed on that assumption.

I'm often just genuinely stunned -- in a good way -- by the kinds of stories that are told in pre-Code films.

Early in March, I watched a movie called Crooner (1932) which presents a fictionalized history of the megaphone crooner craze as a boom-and-bust fame story with some fantastically racy jokes. I'd never heard of it. I don't think it's famous. It's the earliest screen version I've seen of the story where success goes disastrously to a pop star's head and it's all about the way technology changes the face of pop culture. I had no idea anything like it even existed in 1932. And these films just keep turning up.

(Crooner also has my vote for one of the best gags involving queer sexuality that does not depend on flaming stereotypes: in order to convey the protagonist's unprecedented sex appeal, the camera pans across a nightclub to the honey-melting croon of "Three's a Crowd"; table by table, the women all look dreamy-eyed and excited, the men all look resentful and unimpressed, until we reach the dreamy-eyed young man who gushes, "I think he's superb," while the very butch woman next to him, all slicked-back hair and cravat and monocle, says unimpressedly, "He's lousy.")

I actually remember reading that the clear relationship-of-equals and genuine friendship with Chico was one of the reasons the film was so heavily censored.

I really appreciate that she doesn't fall into any of the supportive black friend stereotypes, either. She's not a source of earthy wisdom, she's definitely not Lily's conscience—she's as startled by Lily's last-minute change of heart as the audience and I find myself hoping she went to Paris anyway; they can always reconnect later—and she's the film's moral center only in the very loose sense that Lily's continuing loyalty to Chico demonstrates that she's capable of real emotional attachment, not just the convincing facsimile that draws her marks in. She's just there, being herself, and as firmly committed to Lily as Lily is to her, and that's wonderful to see.

Wild Boys of the Road sounds fascinating!

I loved it. It's kind of the YA version of Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), which I discovered about five years ago and would really love to see again. It's one of the two movies that made me fall in love with Richard Barthelmess, the other being Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and it's another movie that couldn't have been made a year later, starting from the premise: a heroically wounded WWI veteran unjustly loses his job because his medical treatment left him a morphine addict, sending him onto the streets and kicking off another brutal odyssey through the down-and-out world of the Depression. I repeat: this is a movie whose brave, dogged, hardworking hero is a junkie and whose first unkind cut is the crap job that his country does taking care of its veterans. Eventually it concedes to a hopeful ending, positioning Barthelmess as a kind of proto-Tom Joad, tramping the roads with faith that human decency is what endures, but in between it's absolutely scathing about the state of the country and the many different axes of trouble that beset it, from have-and-have-not hypocrisy to labor inequalities to Red scares to police violence to stupid shit luck that nobody's safe against. The suspension of disbelief is that so much injustice could happen to the same person; that all of it was happening to different people around the country, there's no doubt. Barthelmess is amazing and Wellman films the whole thing—as he did with Wild Boys of the Road—like a documentary. I haven't seen many of his post-Code movies, but his pre-Code have been consistently interesting to astonishing. The Public Enemy (1931) is the famous one, obviously, but Other Men's Women and Night Nurse are favorites of mine and The Purchase Price (1932) was batshit but worth watching. Oh, right, and Wings (1927) is actually not chopped liver. But Wellman is so good with dialogue, especially the rapid-fire tough-talk dialogue of the early 1930's, I like his talkies better. I've wanted to see Frisco Jenny (1932) for years on the basis of its title.